It makes enough of a difference to prompt an underlying unease, but it’s sufficiently unobtrusive that the unease needn’t be confronted. The second disruption to conventional life is the ‘stump’ where his left hand should have been with which David/Satyadasa was born. His daughter–Satyadasa’s mother–had felt as a child that ‘the basic trouble with Buddhism was that its scriptures didn’t, it seemed, actively encourage birthday presents or family outings or her choosing any nice things at all.’ Whatever the merits of such questions, David understands that his grandfather is habit-bound and emotionally limited. Grandpa tries to teach the young David to meditate and asks him ontological questions about whether the table at which he is sitting really exists. This is a work of such fathomless obscurity that when Satyadasa later inspects the British Library copy he finds that it has been virtually untouched in three decades. The first is Satyadasa’s grandfather, a quasi-Buddhist intellectual who teaches reverent students in the Cheam Eastern Philosophy Group and eventually writes a book entitled An Existential-Ontological Approach To Contemplative Experience. He grows up in Purley at the southern tip of the London suburbs (as it happens, just a couple of miles from Coulsdon, where I grew up), but two things qualify its ordinariness. Satyadasa is a talented story teller, consistently funny and a wry, astute and witty observer. But even those who who have never packed a bag of lentils or spent long evenings ‘reporting in’ will find much to appreciate in this beautifully written memoir, which goes surprisingly deep because it is so exceptionally honest. It’s natural for someone like me to be interested in a book about life in Triratna, and I think many others in Triratna will find it both familiar and revealing. We’ve been friendly over the years, but our paths have never crossed for long enough to make us proper friends. Like me, David (as Satyadasa is called up to his ordination) grew up in the middle-class South London suburbs and had an Oxbridge education before pitching into communities, Team Based Right Livelihood businesses and the ordination process. He’s about a decade younger than me, but many of the Triratna experiences he describes in The Sound of One Hand are shared. Like Satyadasa I’ve been a part of the Triratna Buddhist Community for the whole of my adult life.
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